It’s March – eat some hedge garlic

It’s March – eat some hedge garlic.

Hedge Garlic (Alliara petiola) is one of the earliest fresh spring greens of the hedgerow, its bright green garlicky leaves appearing from February and at their best as the plant flowers in April and May.

Otherwise known as garlic mustard or Jack-by-the-hedge, it has a more delicate, but nonetheless distinctly oniony, aroma and flavour than the better known wild garlic or ramsons (Allium ursinum).

Much of the flavour is lost in cooking but it holds its own in a salad. As well as the leaves, the young flowers are edible and particularly attractive.

John Evelyn, in his Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (1699) – notes that:

Jack-by-the-Hedge … has many Medicinal Properties, and is eaten as other Sallets, especially by Country People, growing wild under their Banks and Hedges.

Evelyn knows the herb also as sauce-alone, for hedge garlic works well as a garnish and in uncooked sauces.

Richard Mabey’s Food for Free (Collins Natural History) gives a simple but delicious recipe for a sauce for lamb along the lines of mint sauce – just finely chopped hedge garlic (with a little hawthorn and mint) mixed with vinegar and sugar.

Like both garlic and mustard (though it’s not related to either), hedge garlic is highly versatile in the kitchen. Roger Phillips, in his beautifully photographed and meticulously researched Wild Food (Natural history photographic guides), reports that it was once often matched with mutton, salt fish, bacon and herrings.